Link Time

Lately I'm not only not feeling particularly inspired to write anything, but I am reading lots of cool stuff but not taking the time to leave comments. So lucky for all of us--here are links to some great posts and the comments I would have left, had I not been lazy.

• Elizabeth Weaver Engel on social media measurement and where it's headed. Very cool slidedeck pointing out how much social media measurement sucks now, but hopefully some cool things are on the horizon. 
• Lynn Morton on being a responsible Foursquare user. I am a half-hearted Foursquare user since I live in the burbs where hardly any places are already in Foursquare and I don't feel like taking the time to manually add them. Supposedly Foursquare has made some significant changes/enhancements including making it much easier to add new places but I haven't seen any changes yet via the iPhone app (tapping my foot waiting for that new iPhone app to be released...). I personally think Foursquare will be HUGE for businesses. I envision mash-ups between apps: you check in to the local movie theater on Foursquare and receive a coupon (on your phone, of course) for a free popcorn, then are asked if you'd like to review the movie you've just seen, taking you to Flixster. Local restaurants will have seen your check in when the movie started so when you leave you'll be presented with a few deals, then led to Yelp to give a quick thumbs-up or something to the restaurant. The emphasis will be on it being super easy for the user to interact with these places/apps, encouraging participation and, of course, increasing business. But I digress...now I have something to blog about next time, I guess.
• Jeff Hurt's posts are always freakin' brilliant, yet I almost never take the time to leave comments. This one on social conference strategy is particularly interesting; he hits the nail on the head saying that conference organizers need to begin to start thinking like community managers. 
• Even though we've all had it up to hear with year-end wrap up posts and 2010 predictions and resolutions, Angela Connor's five new years resolutions for community managers is worth reading. I particularly like "share great stories up the chain." Yes, it can feel like tooting your own horn, but as Angela says, how are they going to know about what's going on in your online communities unless they know about it? 

I could keep going but better get on with my day...feel free to leave links to posts you've found interesting in the comments. By the way, I hate the way comments on this blog work now--long story short, once upon a time I started using Haloscan for comments because with Blogger's comments you couldn't leave trackback pings. Haloscan got bought by  JS-Kit, who now got bought by Echo and rather than figure out how to export all my old comments back into Blogger I paid to "upgrade" to Echo comments. I hate it--I think it's total overkill as far as how many bells and whistles they incorporate, looks horrible, and if I can ever manage to block out a day or so I will be trying to figure out how to get out of Echo.

Oh, and speaking of changes that suck, can someone PLEASE tell me where spellcheck is in this new Blogger CMS? While I appreciate the new features like bullets, I NEED spellcheck!